Spacenet Transitions into a Managed Networks Company

Recently, Rich Tehrani, the CEO of TMC, met with Glen Katz, president and chief operating officer at Spacenet, at the Gaylord National Hotel just outside of Washington D.C.
 
TMCnet is the leading website designed for communications and technology professionals. TMCnet achieved a record breaking 3 million visitors and 36 million page views in March of 2008, according to Webtrends. And Spacenet, which has been around for over twenty-eight years, has been labeled as a satellite communications company.
 
Katz said "…the reality is that Spacenet is really a managed networks service company. It's just that for the past 28 years, we've done it via satellite."
 
Katz went on to add that three or four years ago, a large portion of Spacenet's business was the enterprise communication space. Retail customers, financial customers, lottery providers and others would use satellite for typical mission-critical applications.
 
But the needs have grown over the years and applications have expanded in their needs and now require higher throughput and lower-latency links. Now customers expect more.
 
Spacenet saw the trend when it began emerging, in the domestic United States. The VSAT market, which had been growing steadily at eight to ten percent a year, had begun to decline. So it knew it needed to evolve.
 
The transition was a natural one. Because Spacenet already had all of the operational facilities, the program management, the network engineering, the installation type of facilities required - and the manpower. The only thing it was missing was connectivity to the terrestrial network.
 
So they found partners and moved into the managed network arena - the retail enterprise space.
 
Spacenet approached its existing customers, and brought their new endeavor to them as an alternative to satellite. Goodyear, Boston Market, and Cumberland Farms all signed on to follow the company into the "brave new market" - the managed VPN services market.